A practical approach that actually works.
In my last few emails, I’ve talked about why some business owners choose to share financial information with their teams.
How it can help people do their jobs better.
And how it can surface insight you’d otherwise miss.
Today, I want to focus on the practical side — how this actually works in real businesses.
Many business owners worry that sharing financial information means flooding people with spreadsheets, or expecting them to suddenly become accountants.
Done badly, that’s exactly what happens.
Done well, it looks very different.
When we help new clients share financial information with their teams, the starting point is never the numbers.
Instead, we spend time understanding the business first — how it really operates, where decisions are made, and what different people are responsible for.
Only then do we start talking about what financial information would actually be useful, both for you as the founder or CEO, and for the people you work with.
Most people don’t instinctively know what they want or need to see — and that’s completely normal.
Part of our role is to guide that thinking. To help you identify which numbers will genuinely support better decisions, rather than just creating more data to wade through. And we refine that over time, as we see what’s actually being used and what isn’t.
This is where our approach differs from more traditional finance support.
The old model was often rigid: long lists of account codes, fixed reporting formats, and very little flexibility.
Producing anything new — or breaking data down in a different way — could be time-consuming and frustrating, which made sharing information far harder than it needed to be.
That doesn’t have to be the case anymore.
The accounting platforms available today — such as iplicit, which we use ourselves and implement for our clients — are far more flexible.
We can segment data cleanly by department, project, geography, product, or any other criteria that’s genuinely meaningful to your business.
Once the structure is set up properly, the same data can be viewed in different ways, in real time, without creating extra work month after month. Different teams can access different dashboards, often updated in real time.
The hard work is upfront: designing the structure, agreeing what matters, and setting things up properly. After that, the information flows.
That might mean moving from two generic reports that don’t quite answer anyone’s questions to half a dozen tailored views that different people actually use — with no additional effort once everything is in place.
I’ve seen how powerful this can be in practice.
A few years ago, we started working with a national charity where most of the team wasn’t very involved in financial matters at all.
Today, the CEO describes her team as being “on a financial journey”.
We worked closely with her to help the team understand the organisation’s finances. She began sharing the results and forecasts we prepared in staff meetings, and we delivered training so the team could confidently use iplicit themselves.
Over time, with the right information and support, they started taking ownership of their own budgets.
Finance became something they engaged with rather than avoided — to the point where it’s now a “shared language” and part of the day-to-day fabric of decision-making, as the CEO puts it.
If you’d like to empower your team in the same way, we can help.
We’ll work closely with you to decide which numbers to share with your team, and how. Not everything — just what’s genuinely useful.
Useful to them, so they can contribute more effectively.
And useful to you, so you get better feedback and lead with fewer blind spots.
Together, we’ll also make sure you have a clear, detailed picture of what’s really happening financially in your business — so you can make better decisions, grow more confidently, and increase profitability.
If that’s the kind of financial insight and support you’re looking for, I’d love to talk.
Simply email garry@insightassociates.co.uk or call us on 01279 647 447 to find out more about how we could work together.
Warmly,
Garry
You might also like: Escape the prison of average financial reports – Insight Associates Limited
